The company’s oil spill response plan for the Chukchi Sea off Alaska was given the all clear by U.S. authorities, even though it’s a work of almost complete fantasy.

While Shell prepares to start trashing this stunning wilderness, putting it at risk of catastrophic oil spills and more melting ice caps as a result of climate change, its PR people are getting busy. This evening—Feb. 21—they’ve invited influential guests to an event at the National Gallery in London, in the hope that those guests will lend the Shell brand a veneer of respectability.

We’ve decided to tell their guests the truth—this year Shell is planning to drill for oil in the pristine waters of the Arctic, and its plans will change this fragile wilderness forever.

So our climbers have made sure that guests at the National Gallery are met with an unexpected picture when they arrive. A short while ago, they evaded security and are preparing to unfurl a huge banner with the words “It’s no oil painting." Our climber Hannah is tweeting from the rooftop using the hashtag #SaveTheArctic.

Meanwhile, Paula Bear has emerged from her wintry den to mingle with the crowds in Trafalgar Square, where dozens of Greenpeace volunteers are talking to curious passers-by.

Polar bears—like other Arctic species including beluga whales, narwhals and walruses—are already under severe pressure in the Arctic from climate change. In just 30 years, the Arctic has lost 75 percent of its sea ice, and temperatures in the Arctic are rising faster than anywhere else on Earth.

While more and more people recognize the changing face of the Arctic as a stark warning about climate change (earlier today, several scientists gave evidence to this effect to the parliamentary inquiry, Protecting the Arctic), Shell sees the melting ice as a business opportunity—a chance to drill in newly accessible areas to find more of the oil that caused the melt in the first place.

And now Shell plans to create a new threat to the Arctic’s stunning—and ecologically fragile—coastlines and oceans: the threat of a catastrophic oil spill, which would be impossible to clean up.

Shell is just first of the so-called ‘supermajors’—the big oil companies—to make exploitation of the Arctic a key part of their strategy. But if it strikes oil this summer, other global oil giants may follow.

Shell sees the Arctic as a resource to be exploited for profit. We think it should be protected. What do you think? Join the discussion on our blog and on Twitter: #SaveTheArctic.

Two years ago this month, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig began drilling on the Macondo Prospect, an operation that would result in one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. Now, as we contemplate exploratory drilling in the Arctic, the Center for American Progress released Putting a Freeze on Arctic Ocean Drilling: America’s Inability to Respond to an Oil Spill in the Arctic, detailing the lack of resources and existing infrastructure to respond to an environmental disaster off Alaska’s North Slope.

Even the well-developed infrastructure and abundance of trained personnel in the Gulf of Mexico didn’t prevent the Deepwater Horizon tragedy. Our Arctic response capabilities pale by comparison. Some in the U.S. are eager to keep pace with other Arctic nations by tapping into the “great opportunity” for economic gain they believe lies beneath the pristine Arctic waters, despite the dangerous dearth of response resources illustrated in the map below.

Drilling for oil in this fragile region, however, should not be pursued without adequate safeguards in place. If we’ve learned anything from the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, it’s that the importance of preparedness cannot be overstated. That is why we strongly recommend specific actions be taken by the federal government, by Congress, and by Shell and other companies before beginning exploratory drilling in the Arctic. Recommendations include:

Ensure adequate response capabilities are in place before drilling operations commence

Require and oversee oil spill response drills in the Arctic that prove the assertions made in company drilling plans prior to plan approval

Engage other Arctic nations in developing an international oil spill response agreement that includes an Arctic Ocean drilling management plan

Appropriate adequate funds for the Coast Guard to carry out its mission in the Arctic, including increasing our icebreaking capability

Certainly, meeting our nation’s energy needs in the near term means maintaining access to domestic offshore oil and gas resources, but it is imperative that we do so in the most prudent, responsible, and environmentally safe manner. And while we applaud the critical reforms implemented by the Obama administration in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, more must be done. Until the oil and gas industry and its federal partners meet the recommendations we lay out in this report and demonstrate the ability to identify and immediately respond to a blowout or oil spill, the Arctic region of the U.S. should remain off-limits to exploration and drilling.

EcoWatch Daily Newsletter

Waterkeeper Alliance and several Gulf Coast Waterkeeper organizations filed suit in Federal Court Feb. 2 against Taylor Energy Company LLC under the citizen suit provisions of the Clean Water Act and Resource Conservation Recovery Act, for ongoing violations stemming from an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that has continued to flow for more than seven years.

Aided by satellite imagery and research conducted by SkyTruth and aerial observation by SouthWings, the Waterkeeper Alliance and its local Waterkeeper organizations learned that the spill, located approximately 11 miles off the coast of Louisiana, started after an undersea landslide in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan in 2004. An offshore platform and 28 wells were damaged, and since then, Taylor has yet to stop the daily flow of oil from the site. Waterkeeper estimates that hundreds of gallons of oil have leaked from the site each day for the last 7 years.

“The plaintiffs filed suit to stop the spill and lift the veil of secrecy surrounding Taylor Oil’s seven-year long response and recovery operation,” explained Marc Yaggi, executive director of Waterkeeper Alliance. “Neither the government nor Taylor will answer basic questions related to the spill response, citing privacy concerns.” The public deserves to know how this spill happened and why it continues. Coastal communities should understand the risks involved in developing off-shore oil resources and what protections are in place to prevent damage from future spills.

“The Taylor Oil spill is emblematic of a broken system, where oil production is prioritized over concerns for human health and the environment,” said Justin Bloom, eastern regional director of Waterkeeper Alliance. “Nearly two years after the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill, none of the comprehensive reforms recommended by the National Oil Spill Commission have been enacted and Congress has yet to pass a single law to better protect workers, the environment or coastal communities.”

Meanwhile, President Obama, in his State of the Union, has called for a massive push to open up 38 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil exploration and extraction. He also seeks to open up pristine Arctic waters to drilling. The Taylor spill is in relatively shallow and accessible waters compared to the deepwater, challenging environment where Big Oil has set its sights. Oil exploration and extraction technology has dramatically outpaced the development of safety and recovery technology and it appears that the current regulatory regime is incapable of protecting us from a runaway industry.

A report released this week by the Gulf Monitoring Consortium, a partnership between Waterkeeper Alliance, SkyTruth and SouthWings, investigates several spills in the Gulf (including the Taylor Spill) and highlights numerous deficiencies in the reporting and response process.

“Imagine an incident like the Taylor Spill in a deepwater, high-pressure environment, that could not be contained in 7 years,” said Paul Orr, the Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper. “Do we really want to race to the bottom without a lifeline when it looks like Big Oil is still at the helm?”

Waterkeeper Alliance is a global environmental movement uniting more than 190 Waterkeeper organizations around the world and focusing citizen advocacy on the issues that affect our waterways, from pollution to climate change. Waterkeepers patrol more than 1.5 million square miles of rivers, streams and coastlines in the Americas, Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa.

The Jan. 26 announcement by the U.S. Department of the Interior to sell leases and allow offshore oil drilling in 38 million acres in the Central Gulf of Mexico is troubling, because the regulatory oversight and safety problems that led to BP’s 2010 catastrophic Gulf oil spill haven’t yet been remedied.

Just last month, the National Academy of Engineering issued a report concluding that deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is fraught with corner-cutting and lax regulatory oversight.

Deep water drilling in the Gulf, the report said, is “some of the most complex and most risky ventures conducted by commercial enterprises,” and that the devastating BP well explosion raises “questions about the industry’s overall safety preparedness, the ability to handle the complexities of the deep-water operations, and industry oversight to approve and monitor well plans and operational practices and personnel competency and training.”

The engineering experts concluded that a deficient safety culture led BP to rely on blowout preventers as equipment that just “couldn’t fail.” Even before the well blowout, “there were numerous warnings to both industry and regulators about potential failures of existing” blowout preventers, the report says. The report points to studies in 2001, 2002, 2004, and a 1999 well blowout and fire off the Louisiana coast.

Ignoring the experts’ findings, the Interior Department is now allowing more deep water drilling, which leaves communities vulnerable to another major oil spill along the Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida coasts.

“The federal government is acting as if the BP disaster never happened,” said Earthjustice attorney David Guest. “The Interior Department is supposed to be looking out for the public. Instead, they are pandering to drilling companies and putting Gulf Coast communities at risk.”

The high risk involved in deep water drilling is the subject of an Earthjustice lawsuit against the federal government. The suit contends that federal regulators have conducted an irrationally optimistic risk assessment for Shell Oil Company’s plan to drill for oil in deep Gulf waters near the site of BP’s devastating spill. Earthjustice filed suit on behalf of the Sierra Club, the Gulf Restoration Network, and the Florida Wildlife Federation. The legal challenge in the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, Ga. now awaits oral arguments. Earthjustice’s challenge points out that Shell’s exploration plan anticipates the company using the same type of blowout preventer that failed at BP’s Deepwater Horizon well. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEM) approved Shell’s plan after concluding that another accidental spill is virtually impossible.

“The Shell plan should be withdrawn until BOEM completes a risk assessment that comports with the facts found by independent experts,” Guest said. “The academy report proves that the government’s optimistic risk assessments for deep water drilling are wrong.”